Welcome to your Week in Tech – a roundup of the week’s top technology news.
We filmed this episode from the London office and showroom of MADE.com, a designer furniture e-commerce platform.
In this episode, we bring you Iwoca’s £21m Series C round, £220m for the UK tech sector, Salesforce’s acquisition of Krux and Toyota’s baby bot.
Watch the video, or read on for all this and more.
Investments
In investment news, Iwoca, a finance lender for SMEs, closed a £21m Series C funding round. The round, led by Prime Ventures, brings the firm’s total funding raised to £38m.
Live streaming platform TVPlayer closed a £5m round. Existing investors, including Beringea, took part alongside A+E Networks, which led the round.
Glaswegian CRM platform Swipii secured $2.5m. The firm, which helps small merchants increase customer loyalty, hopes to use the new funding to expand across the UK.
Other investments this week include credit score provider Aire’s $2m round, the £1.5m Series A by Cambridge-based HealthTech startup Healx, recruitment tech firm Gig’s £1m Seed and clean tech startup Switchee’s £605,000 Seed.
Best of British
The chancellor of the exchequer, Philip Hammond, announced at the Conservative Party Conference that £220m would be allocated to boosting the UK’s technology sector.
During his speech, the chancellor said £100m would be used to help life science firms make a commercial success of their medical technologies. The remaining £120m will be used to stimulate collaboration between universities and business.
International story
Big international stories of the week include the acquisition of data management platform Krux by Salesforce. The customer management software giant acquired Krux for $700m. The deal will enable Salesforce to extend its audience segmentation and targeting capabilities.
Google also made an announcement this week, using a keynote event to unveil its new phone. Called Pixel, the handset features unlimited photo storage, a 12 mega pixel camera and comes in three colours: Very Silver, Quite Black and Really Blue.
Download
Our download of the week is Gideon Smart Home. From entertainment to security, users can control all their smart home devices from a single app.
Compatible with a wide range of smart home devices, features of the app include multi-home management and energy consumption monitoring.
For more on the smart home, keep an eye out for the upcoming PropTech issue of our quarterly print magazine!
And finally…
And finally, Toyota has launched a baby robot to provide companionship to people in Japan following plummeting birth rates in the country.
Retailing at 39,800 yen, which is £300, the baby bot comes equipped with artificial intelligence and a camera. They can recognise faces and react to human emotion.
Cute or a bit weird? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
That’s it for this episode of The Week in Tech, for more technology news, head over to our homepage and follow us on Twitter.